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This thesis is an ethnographic study of the complex interplay between tourism and traditional Irish music based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Doolin, County Clare, Ireland between June 2002 and August 2003. The historical development of traditional Irish music and the localised tourist industry have become conjoined during the last three decades, and as a result the music and the idea of Doolin as a 'place' have become institutionalised and consolidated. This has further led to the development of a complex socioeconomic structure surrounding the music, its performance, and its commercialisation and consumption. The local social structure has also become complicated and internationalised. Specifically, the locale has seen a significant growth in the 'incomer' population, called 'blow-ins'. Blow-ins in this case have in fact become the inheritors and propagators of the local music scene, but this causes surprisingly little cognitive dissonance or tension between locals and incomers. This is despite the fact that the music is the raison d'etre of the local tourism industry. I propose that those incomers who successfully inherit and propagate the local music become assets to the cultural capital of the village, not a drain on it. Moreover, I suggest that the 'authenticity' of the music is not an ascribed quality but interdependently related to social status, seasonality, one’s relationship with the music, context, and phenomenologically inter subjective relations. By means of holistic anthropological research, this thesis attempts to refine our understanding of complex social relations in touristed destinations, the appropriation of musical 'traditions', and sharpen current anthropological theories surrounding the issues of 'authenticity' and globalisation.

This thesis examines music-making among Brazilian migrants in Madrid, Spain. It explores how cultural diversity is mediated through music and articulated in dialogue with national stereotypes of Brazil harboured by Spaniards. Since the independence of Brazil the country's popular music has been engaged in a unique dialogue with other international styles giving rise, in the early 20th century, to hegemonic notions of Brazil as a hybrid, happy, sensuous country represented by samba. With the country's urbanisation, the rise of new civil movements and the return to democracy in 1985, however, cultural diversity gained unprecedented attention as a wealth of previously under-represented ethnic and regional populations and their accompanying musical styles exploded onto the national scene. Developments in the cultural industry allowed such populations to make claims on national and international musical styles while articulating 'rooted' ;, identities through the manipulation of discourses and practices of 'mixing'. These new configurations have posed a threat to urban, middle class populations who had previously claimed to represent diversity while projecting a ,'civilised' image abroad. As Brazil suffered a series of economic crises in the 1980s, large numbers of middle class Brazilians began to migrate abroad and at the turn of the century, other previously under-represented populations were able to do the same. This has led to an increasingly heterogeneous Brazilian transnational scene where nationalism must be negotiated between them and between 'host' countries for whom hegemonic notions of Brazilian-ness remain. I argue that music-making provides a fundamental tool through which Brazilian immigrants articulate 'rooted' cosmopolitan identities through such negotiations

My doctoral thesis is the culmination of years of research on Mande hunters and their music in libraries, national archives, and intensive fieldwork of 18 months among hunters in Mali. I employed the methodology of participant observation through apprenticeship, as a student of Solomane Konate, one of the most prominent hunters' musicians, a skilful hunter, knowledgeable healer, and gifted diviner, with whom I learned how to play and experience hunters' music and performance. I travelled and participated in hunters' ceremonies and public events, followed him to recording sessions and documented recording practices and events, and learned the behavioural code and worldview of the hunters. The primary aim was to document the evolution of a commercial Malian music industry, based on an ethnographic account of the contexts, social organization, aesthetics and symbolism of the hunters' musical tradition in Mali. Here, I explore themes of apprenticeship, hunters' performance, hunters' music, hunters' music industry, hunters' radio programmes, and finally , the popularity of hunters' music, through inquiry and discourse. I discuss the impact of the record industry and cassette recordings of hunters' music on the tradition itself, and on contemporary forms of Mali an music. I show why this tradition is popular among hunters and non-hunters, and consider what it is that hunters are voicing that speaks so fully to contemporary needs and memories of Malian society. My approach is essentially phenomenological. Although I contextualise theoretically the field data, my interpretations are kept to a minimum, in favour of my consultants' own interpretations and explanations of their lifeworld. By including the voices of performers and their experiences as musicians and as members of the hunters' associations along with the experiences of music producers and radio presenters, I explore issues of continuity and change, ideology, and style as a medium for publicly presenting and negotiating hunters' and ultimately Malian identity.

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This thesis examines the activities of the Myōan Kyōkai, which is based at Myōan Temple in Kyoto Japan. It identifies the Myōan Kyōkai as a community and examines the contexts in which members pursue their activities, which are all centred around the shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute. The shakuhachi itself is most often associated with the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism and its monks/priests of 'emptiness and nothingness' (Komusō). After almost two centuries of holding a virtual monopoly of the instrument, the sect was proscribed by the Japanese government in 1871. Of the sect's three main temples, only one (Myōan Temple) survives, albeit by necessity in a somewhat modified form. Research questions revolve around the theme of community. What factors contribute to forming the Myōan Kyōkai into a community and then what sustains it as a community? This study identifies three interdependent components that each play some part in defining the Myōan Kyōkai as a community: music, history, and religion. Given that the shakuhachi continues to have such strong links to Zen Buddhism, it has seen contextual changes that often include the concert stage or see it performed in recital-type situations. This thesis seeks to situate the shakuhachi within this larger context back into its original settings in order to illuminate the use of the shakuhachi in an organised and institutionalised form as currently practiced in a Zen temple.

This thesis focuses on the transmission and role of poetry and song within the Somali community in London’s King’s Cross, which has developed since 1991 as Somalis have fled from violence in their homeland. I explore the relationship between past and present, continuity and change within Somali oral artforms, and the role of song and poetry in transmitting cultural knowledge. I also consider the potential of sound archives – specifically the British Library’s World and Traditional Music section, which neighbours the Somali community in King’s Cross – to support the continuation of oral tradition and impact upon individual and collective memory processes within diasporic communities. I demonstrate the ongoing role of poetry and song in mediating and communicating relationship with place and negotiating multiple subjectivities among Somalis in the diaspora, presenting examples of Somali community members in King’s Cross renewing, constructing and expressing sense of belonging to different locales and group identities through composing, listening to, discussing and performing song and poetry. With “proactive archiving” (drawing on Edmonson’s “proactive access” 2004: 20) at the heart of my methodology, I elucidate the relationship between song as an archival form and the place and practice of ethnomusicology sound archives, demonstrating the challenges and benefits of engaging diasporic communities with archival recordings. I consider the dynamism of the Somali oral network and the ongoing mobility and change experienced by Somali residents of King’s Cross, which stands in notable contradistinction to the permanence and fixity of the British Library, and I call for a move forward from the notion of proactive archiving to one of sustainable archiving – an approach that would empower community members to record and archive their personal musical heritage in a systematic and ongoing way.

Focusing on Mirpuris and music in Bradford, this doctoral thesis offers an ethnomusicological dimension to continuing debates on multiculturalism in Britain, within the fields of anthropology, sociology and political science. I engage ethnographically with three spaces of Mirpuri music making – the mehfil, the street, and the festival – in order to develop a ground-level perspective on what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society. By paying close attention to intra-communal generational discourses and practices of music, a synchronic picture of multiculturalism is developed that takes into account local, national and transnational histories. I argue that discursive senses of belonging, articulated through and by music, offer alternative and more broadly inclusive insights into what it means to migrate to Britain, what it means to be born in Britain, and, ultimately, what it means to ‘be’ British. Drawing on theories of multiculturalism, music and migration, nationalism and segregation, my broad argument is that an ethnographic map of Mirpuri music making in Bradford provides a more contemporarily relevant picture of multicultural society than one drawn along racial, or religious, lines alone.

In this thesis I argue that the relationship between the increasing ubiquity of digital audio technologies and the transformation of aesthetic hierarchies in electroacoustic and sound art traditions is not deterministic, but negotiated by producers and policy-makers in specific historical and cultural contexts. Interviews, observations, and historical data were gathered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian city of Montreal between 2011 and 2012. Research was conducted and analysed in collaboration with a transnational group of researchers on a programme of comparative research that tracked global changes to music and musical practice associated with digital technologies. The introduction presents Montreal as a rich ecology in which to track struggles for aesthetic authority, detailing its history as a key site of electroacoustic and sound art production, and its local positioning as a politically strategic 'hub' for the Canadian culture industry. Core chapters examine the specific role of digital mediation in the negotiation of electroacoustic and sound art aesthetics from multiple interlocking perspectives: the recursive relationship between technological affordances and theories of mediation; the mobilisation of digital technologies in the delineation of cultural, professional and generational territories; the political contestation of digital literacies and pedagogies; the articulation of the digital's opposition with analogue in the construction of instruments and recording formats; and the effects of the digital on the dynamics of genre and genre hierarchies. The concluding chapter offers a critique of the notion that digital mediation has shifted the balance between the normative and the generative dimensions of genrefication in the scenes in question, and closes by suggesting how a better understanding of this shift at an empirical level can inform an ongoing rethinking of the interaction between technology and aesthetics among scholars, policy makers, and musicians.

Cette thèse porte sur la mise en scène des répertoires traditionnels ouïghours, dans sa forme musicale, chorégraphique et théâtrale. Depuis plusieurs décennies, les grands spectacles pluridisciplinaires mettent en scène l’héritage culturel ouïghour. Ces spectacles, créés par les artistes de la communauté eux-mêmes, visent cette même communauté. Ils passent par des processus de réarrangement, de canonisation et surtout de théâtralisation (à l’occidentale) pour rendre l’art traditionnel brut présentable sur une scène. Ces constats mènent à s’interroger sur la manière dont la société ouïghour contemporaine écoute ses musiques et regarde ses danses. Les questions du rôle de l’art et de la culture dans la vie quotidienne et de leur impact sur le sentiment d’appartenance nationale sont au cœur de ces réflexions. Ce travail s’intéresse à l’origine de la professionnalisation issue des mouvements réformistes dans les années 1920-30. La création de troupes artistiques a joué à la fois un rôle éducatif et divertissant, mais aussi de symbole de résistance. Au cours du siècle, ce mouvement artistique a traversé plusieurs périodes, parfois même douloureuses. Mais aujourd’hui, la scène artistique est productive et de plus en plus active. Cette thèse s'appuyant sur l’étude de sources, sur des enquêtes de terrain, l’analyse des discours et des spectacles, essaye de dégager les mécanismes de représentation de soi des artistes ouïghours, en tant que peuple et nation, aux yeux du monde extérieur. En affirmant l'identité ethnique, ces mises en scènes participent efficacement à la construction nationale, un combat qui touche toute la communauté ouïghour, et tente de dresser une image reconnue tant par ses membres qu’aux yeux du monde. / This thesis focuses on the staging of Uyghur traditional art in its musical, chorographical and theatrical forms. For decades, large multidisciplinary performances depicted the Uyghur cultural heritages. Distended to share with their own, these performances are created by the artists of the community. Rearrangement, canonization, dramatizing (in Western style) are used to transform traditional art, to be more attractive on stage. This created an outstanding “bricolage” of all aspect of one culture, to be put in one space and in a limited time. These findings lead to questioning the ways of listening to music and watching dance in contemporary Uighur society. Equally, this phenomenon questions the role of art and culture in their everyday life. Furthermore, the impact of all these transformation on the sense of national identity is at the heart of our reflections. This thesis is interested in the origin of artistic professionalization established by the reform movements in the 1920s-30s, which played a role of educating and at the same time entertaining the population/poeple, and became a symbole of resistence in the region. Today, the stage represents an important aspect of uyghur society. After many years of fieldwork, analysing the discourse and different kinds of professional performances this thesis identifies the self- representation mechanisms of Uyghurs, as one nation, one ethnic group, to the outside world. It relies on historical sources, years of fieldwork in different regions of Xinjiang, includes different kinds of professional or amateur performances, and interviews of the actors and experts's discourse.